Each new “best albums” list published seems to confirm: We couldn’t agree on much this year. And it’s extremely exciting. The music industry at large continued to decentralize, with our biggest stars and returning veterans sharing airtime with newcomers and indie upstarts. Really the only constant seemed to be in…

The A.V. Club’s list of 2018’s best albums was determined by eight critics, who each submitted a ranked ballot of their top 10 to 20 records of the year. Those ballots can be found below, some with annotations providing insight into their choices.

Like pop and R&B, indie and rock are huge, diverse fields overlapping and extending outward to countless iterations, a reality reflected in our picks for the best albums of the year below. You might’ve been looking for Jeff Rosenstock on our punk and hardcore list, or Neko Case among our top 10 country albums, but…

Pop music is relentlessly omnivorous. In 2018, some of its biggest hits drew from trap, bounce, Reggaeton, African folk, and EDM, to name a few, while also advancing the genre’s overall fusion with R&B—which is why we’ve decided to group the two genres together here in their own top 10. On the charts, the conversation…

Paul Williams helped build the sound of the 1970s, penning hits for The Carpenters and Three Dog Night before picking up a Grammy and an Oscar for his contributions to the Barbra Streisand-Kris Kristofferson version of A Star Is Born. In 1976, he traveled to the United Kingdom to tape a guest appearance on The Muppet…

Any dyed-in-the-wool Chicagoan will tell you that the summers make sticking out the nearly six-month winters worth it (whether or not you believe any of us is up to you). All the memories of scraping layers of ice off our windshields and trudging through puddles of slushes melt away on the first 80-degree stretch,…

Psst—even if you don’t listen to electronic music, every record you’ve ever heard is electronic music. The truth of this sophism is deepening as electronic instruments and idioms overtake every genre. Euro-pop arpeggios twist through country radio. Modular drones whir through folk. Synth rock, once a subgenre, now…

There’s a lot of music out there. To help you cut through all the noise, every week The A.V. Club is rounding up A-Sides, five recent releases we think are worth your time. You can listen to these and more on Spotify.

From one angle, the country music narrative in 2018 was distinguished by consistency. Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line’s easygoing soul-twang confection “Meant To Be” spent a staggering, record-setting 50 weeks atop the Hot Country Songs chart, while the vast majority of award winners and chart-toppers are all…

Earl Sweatshirt’s 2015 album I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside is one of the best rap albums of the decade, but it was a grower, claustrophobic and dissonant. Some Rap Songs aims higher and makes you work harder. That blurry cover and demurring title are no feint; he’s buried in the mix, his voice fighting against…

In 2018, the loose genre boundaries of punk and hardcore became more expansive than ever. For decades now, these blanket terms have encompassed a wide swath of sounds, ideologies, and aesthetics. But for most of that time, those distinct subgenres were largely walled off from one another, rarely mingling, much less…

There’s a lot of music out there. To help you cut through all the noise, every week The A.V. Club is rounding up A-Sides, five recent releases we think are worth your time. You can listen to these and more on Spotify.

No sane, decent person could get through this year without experiencing at least a few flashes of rage or despair. Both are integral, of course, to the emotional language of heavy metal. In 2018, the genre provided a sturdy soundtrack to our collective meltdown, offering commiseration by the blast beat and power…

There’s a lot of music out there. To help you cut through all the noise, every week The A.V. Club is rounding up A-Sides, five recent releases we think are worth your time. You can listen to these and more on Spotify.

One of the central storylines of A Star Is Born is Jackson Maine’s (Bradley Cooper) struggle with hearing loss and tinnitus, made worse by the fact that he’s a musician who performs live concerts and exposes himself to loud sounds on a daily basis. While most of us aren’t famous musicians playing shows every night,…

Charles Bradley came by the raw emotion in his voice honestly. He was really only famous for six of his 68 years on this planet; the remaining 62 were filled with struggle and sorrow, from the nights he spent sleeping on New York City subway trains as a teenager to the murder of his brother Joe, who Bradley described…

Eric D. Johnson was stranded. When he called the The A.V. Club from a rental-car counter in Atlanta, the facility was fresh out of cars, bringing a sudden halt to a long day of travel for the singer-songwriter who’s been recording under the Fruit Bats moniker since 1997. Johnson was stranded, but not without support:…

Often the last big records of the year arrive in November, making it a fair bet that Solange’s “imminent,” highly anticipated fourth album will drop in the next few weeks. There are also promising new efforts on the horizon from Anderson Paak, Dead Can Dance, Cupcakke, Josephine Foster, and Jeff Tweedy, plus exciting…